Can The Book Publishing Process be Re-envisioned?

HANK PHILLIPPI RYAN: Let’s talk about…books. It's certainly a puzzle for anyone who's ever written a book, or tried to sell a book, and probably on the minds of wise people who read books: how does a book get published in the first place?

Who decides which books are publisher-worthy and which ones are not? Many authors have turned to self-publishing, and many have simply given up.

Best-selling and award-winning author Henriette Lazaridis, along with author Anjali Mitter Duva, has been thinking about this, too. With some pretty groundbreaking results.

HANK: First, from your research, has publishing always been like this? I remember one of my favorite movies, The Man Who Invented Christmas, showed Charles Dickens fighting with his agent and his publisher about his future after the failure of Bleak House. (Or something like that.) And how Dickens was in danger of not having any more books published. I mean, fiction, but... That got me thinking, too, about how fascinating it is that publishing today is so cutthroat and so competitive and so hard line.

 

HENRIETTE LAZARIDIS: Publishing didn’t always look the way it does now. It wasn’t always populated by the Big Five publishers at one end of the spectrum and hundreds of small and micro presses and self-publishers on the other end. Nor was it the case that excellent writers struggled to secure a book deal, while the market made room for celebrity memoirs and self-help treatises. Things used to be different. Just not in the way we all tend to think.

HANK: How’d it work before?

HENRIETTE: Before, say, 1880, there were many different ways for books to reach readers. Books were sold in department stores. There were door-to-door sales and subscriptions. Publishers doubled as booksellers. Publishing costs were frequently paid for by the authors themselves. The concept of a monolithic publishing mode–in which the author secures an agent who then secures a publisher who then sells copies of the books in bookstores only? That concept is relatively new.

HANK: You can see why that would theoretically work, though-- there's an agent/gatekeeper who chooses the best books, whatever that means, and then they funnel those to the publisher who chooses, theoretically, the best of the best. It kind of makes sense.

HENRIETTE: Yes, but the system is fairly inflexible. The “traditional” publishing industry is often resistant to acknowledging it comes from a tradition of innovation. What we’re seeing now, in this time of the rise of hybrid presses, cooperative presses, books selling in non-bookstore markets: all of this should be welcomed without a value judgment. Just because it’s different, that doesn’t mean it’s wrong.

HANK: And I think people's thinking about traditional publishing is changing, too, while still embracing it, and now being open to other pathways.

  HENRIETTE: I think it can certainly be done another way. And as an author, I'm looking at it from the viewpoint of view of content producer, right? There are no books without us authors. So now, along with Anjali Mitter Duva, we’ve co-founded Galiot Press, a new publishing company that re-envisions the entire publishing process, from how books are selected and acquired, to how they’re produced and distributed, even to the scope of the reading experience the customer will have.

HANK: You and I have talked about this, before, and some of the things I think are so --I mean, for instance, how many times have we heard our colleagues gripe and worry about how long it takes to get an answer to our submissions?

HENRIETTE: These days, it’s common for writers pitching agents (and agents pitching editors) to hear no response at all from the people they’ve contacted. There’s a reason for this. Agents are overwhelmed with queries from an ever-growing population of writers; and editors are overwhelmed with the demands of their positions, which increasingly involve far more than editing.

 

HANK: How else could it be done?

 

HENRIETTE: Well, we’re adopting a workflow system that limits the number of queries we take in each week to the time we know we have available for them. Like the restaurant industry, from whom we borrowed this reservation approach, we won’t just open our doors and serve anyone and everyone all the time. Galiot Press won’t ghost you because we won’t ever have an overwhelming number of queries to consider.

 

HANK: I can't wait to hear how you're going to handle that! Will you still keep the agent model?

HENRIETTE: Agents perform an invaluable service to their clients–from negotiating contracts, to editing, to securing ancillary rights, and more. But plenty of excellent writers with excellent books struggle to find the one agent who will enthusiastically take them on. We certainly believe in curation–or else we wouldn’t be running our own press–but we believe in access, too. So we will accept queries from agented and un-agented authors alike, with no bias to distinguish between the two groups.

HANK: Another thing we hear a lot about is print run; how publishers decide how many books to print, and that reflects an investment, which in turn reflects a commitment. Are you changing that too?

HENRIETTE: Traditional publishing estimates a number of copies to print ahead of on-sale day–copies which are shipped to bookstores that have ordered them. These copies may be shipped back to the publisher if they don’t sell, in which case the publisher must buy back the copies. It’s a system that can be catastrophic for micro and small presses. It’s also a system that is terrible for the environment: so much packaging, shipping, fuel, and, often, over-printing and then destruction of books.

Publishing doesn’t need to be doing this in the 21st century. Print-on-demand technology allows a copy to be printed and drop-shipped directly to the customer (or to the bookstore, if it’s ordered from there). There are no returns, and no extra shipping. And let’s remember that e-books have even less environmental impact and an even speedier delivery to the awaiting reader. For all these reasons, Galiot Press will rely on print-on-demand as well as e-books.


HANK: I heard someone say once that book world depends on the concept of “the same but different.” That people want a book that feels comfortable and familiar, but is just a different story. And those “same but different” books are the ones that will succeed

HENRIETTE: The whole process is a guess–unless you’re publishing a book that’s very similar to one you’ve published before, with a similar market. To take the uncertainty out of the print-run guesswork, publishers are more likely to acquire books that repeat formulas or types they’ve sold already. They counteract the financial risk of the print run (and its up-front expense) by being artistically conservative. But we’re doing the opposite. Without the up-front commitment of a print run, we can be free-er with the books we publish, favoring excellent books that are unique rather than familiar.

HANK: Do you think this will all work? What’s your timetable? Can people submit to you now? And you must have an innovative distribution plan, too---because the book to reader connection is the key to it all! So where can writers go to find out more?

 

HENRIETTE: We’re open to submissions starting on May 20, but anyone interested can visit our website now and learn more about the submissions system. We’ll be looking for the first three books for our fall collection, which we’ll publish in Fall of 2025. Our distribution plan is, in fact, innovative! And our website has tons more information about our mission, our systems, and our plans. You can also sign up for our Substack newsletter where we write about our process along the way at http://galiotpress.substack.com.

HANK: Reds and writers, have you felt frustrated in your search for a publisher? And readers, do you ever think about where your books come from? And which books you may never have seen because of the system itself?

 

What questions do you have for Henriette and Anjali?

 

Henriette Lazaridis’s second novel Terra Nova was called “ingenious” and “provocative” by The New York Times and her debut The Clover House was a Boston Globe bestseller. Her latest novel, Last Days in Plaka, came out in April 2024 and was a Good Morning America Buzz pick. Her short work has appeared in Elle, The New York Times, New England Review, and more. She runs the Krouna Writing Workshop in northern Greece and is a co-founder of Galiot Press, ushering in a sea change in publishing.

 

Anjali Mitter Duva is an Indian American writer, planner, and publisher who was raised in France. She is the author of Faint Promise of Rain, shortlisted for a William Saroyan International Prize for fiction. Anjali is a co-founder of Galiot Press and a former fiction Co-Editor at Solstice Literary Magazine. She co-founded and runs the Arlington Author Salon, and is also a co-founder of the Indian kathak dance non-profit Chhandika. Anjali was educated at Brown University and MIT.